PSN Maintenance Extended, Downtime Even Hitting Those That Had Signed in Before

Kicking off the new year with a bang, Sony decided to bring down the PSN for 12 hours while they did some maintenance. But if you signed in since Tuesday, you were set to be able to still log on (just not to the store), and it was all going to be back to normal on 8:00 pm PST (9:00 pm MT, 10:00 pm CT, 11:00 pm ET). Unfortunately, the PSN is still down and some people who signed in since Tuesday aren’t able to get on.
-PSLS
(PS Vita, PS3, PSP)

From a technical standpoint, having SEN (not just PSN, but all of SEN) down in this manner is bad business and a sign of poor procedures when it comes to doing rolled out updates. Taking down the central element to an infrastructure should not take more than a few hours, let alone more than a day. This is removing the ability for people to use services they have subscribed to (Qriocity and the like) and is just poor business design.

Sony needs to improve on this next gen. Problems like this will not be looked upon favorably if they still exist and have not had the attention they need to make things easier for their customers.

I get the whole, you don't pay for it so it's okay. But, from a business and technology solutions perspective, that's not enough and they really are capable of setting up something that doesn't require this much downtime.

"From a technical standpoint, having SEN (not just PSN, but all of SEN) down in this manner is bad business and a sign of poor procedures when it comes to doing rolled out updates. Taking down the central element to an infrastructure should not take more than a few hours, let alone more than a day."

The problem with computers is you always have a chance that something doesn't work. They probably ran into problems. Nothing is perfect. It's better that it isn't up than it's up and buggy or has security problems.

***The problem with computers is you always have a chance that something doesn't work.***

First of all, this isn't just 'computers', it's a network related issue. There's a lot more to it than just that, including software.

Second, that's why you go from development to testing and then to production (sometimes even a staging process before production). Even when doing hardware updates, you do testing to remove all potential for issues.

Third, this initial planned downtime was 12 hours. My argument is that it shouldn't take that long. How long is XBL down during updates? How long is Google login down during updates? How long is Netflix down during updates? How long is Amazon.com down during updates? How long is Steam down during updates? You see where I'm going with this?

Fourth, don't think that just because Sony provides good content and service that they can't be better. Honestly, if Sony got rid of 12-hour downtimes, don't you think everyone here would see that as a massive benefit? So, why would saying that they update their process to get rid of these is it a negative? Because any negative must be from someone who is Anti-Sony and only wants to see Sony fail? No, that's not how progress is made. Realize that Sony needs to improve on so many things because anything that is a negative now is only going to be even more of a negative when they put our their next console with a supposed improved infrastructure to support more than what we have now.

This is beyond a joke now, its been down for over 24 hours yet I have a mate who lives a few doors down from me who is logged in fine and has been for most of the day.

Its either UP or DOWN, it shouldn't be working for some and not for others, all the people defending them saying 'oh its important for security etc' are missing the fact that they've clearly f*cked something up thats now been followed with an update on the PSN twitter feed to the effect of 'Sorry, maintenance has been pushed back again until tomorrow morning at least'

World of Warcraft has had these same kinds of issues for years, every Tuesday in fact. Even worse when it's a big update roll out.

These things are an inconvenience, and definitely annoying, but for the most part consumers suck it up and deal with it.

Bad for business? Sure. Obviously their engineers aren't sitting there eating donuts and drinking coffee in the break room while the company is losing lots of money. Something didn't go as expected. This was a fairly large change to their whole network, sometimes you just can't test for that kind of stuff. Even beta tests of online functionality never show all the possible end results.

The biggest complaint I might have is that companies (not just Sony) don't really address why these things take longer, and when they do they are vague about the details, thus leaving things up to wild speculation, and leaving the customer hanging wondering when it's going to be fixed.

***World of Warcraft has had these same kinds of issues for years, every Tuesday in fact. Even worse when it's a big update roll out. ***

That is correct. WoW _had_ these issues when it released back in 2004. All of that tied to massive amounts of database data being managed and processed in that manner. Someone also got fired because of the issues they had (the person in charge got canned and they looked for someone else two weeks after the game's release).

So...

Again, how is it that other companies that handle similar (if not a heck of a lot more) data and connections to users through such data are able to keep their services up for longer than PSN each year and not go down for regular maintenance like PSN has over the last few years?

With PSN downtime being extended to tomorrow, are we really still questioning that they obviously have issues with the manner in which they decide to perform updates? Do we not recognize that they are not testing enough to account for these issues. Do they not have test environments that replicate the hardware and software currently on production and are managed in a similar manner? I know this is a massive network of computers and processes, but if others can do it so can Sony.

@cg In response to wow, whoever they hired to replace that guy didn't do much to alleviate the issues as they're still prevalent. I was only citing it as an example of what they do, and how sometimes(at least every 5-6 weeks), their service goes down for longer than anticipated, sometimes resulting in fully unplayable days.

To the topic at hand

It's hard to say honestly. It may come down to that Sony slapped together much of their network to perform in ways it was never meant to be. As such everything has been a band-aid fix which is simply culminating in longer down times as the years go by.

When it comes to Sony's networks, I think there is just too much unknown among the masses that don't really know how it works. The comments I see on here seem to me people(not necessarily you) that don't understand how complex these systems are.

For now, we don't know what the issue is, and I see a lot of people jumping the gun. I'm sure Sony does have all that stuff you mention, but without knowing the underlying causes of why these issues are appearing, it just makes it into a fan boy discussion about how much they suck.

The only real viable option would seem for them to start from scratch. It's something I'm sure they are looking into when the migration to PS4 comes along. It can be seen as early as last year when they started migrating over to SEN instead of having PSN separate.

I'd personally like to see them move to a more streamlined approach. It would be a massive benefit as you say, and it apparently is like that on Live.

My original post was not about whether the down time is good or not...just that people should understand that Sony isn't sitting on it's laurels when it comes to resolving this issue. I'm sure their engineers are working at this very moment to get the problem resolved. It is not an issue of Sony sucks, but more they don't inform people of what the issues are, and that everyone chimes in with their own speculation without knowing the actual problems, both major and minor.

i've been signed in since the maintenance and after it started even. I've been passing the time playing dungeon hunter and uncharted 2 both online. And other friends have been playing their cod like they do every night. Some of those aren't even aware of the maintenance i'm sure, no big deal at all. You just can't go into the store, account management or Home is all.

I've been unable to sign in all day, yet I was on yesterday. My roommates? TWO of them are logged in, on the same internet connection, both playing Mass Effect 3 online right now, while I can't even sign into PSN.

Freakin' weird, man. Disappointing if I'm gonna be stuck offline all night, too, while I get taunted by roommates who are oddly able to log in while I'm not. =P

I was goning to play Portal 2 tonight, co-op, with my buddy. He could log into the Steam servers (PS3) I couldnt, thought we would give BF3 ago, he could sign in to the EA servers, I couldnt, he only lives afew miles away from me aswel, I thought it seemed odd, I could sign into the PSN, but play nothin online, oh well I thought, might aswel start playin Mass Effect

This sorta thing always happens when im off work, I really want that Portal 2 platinum

I was actually on, got the error saying I've been logged off. Tried to log back in got the "under maintenance" error. I'm at work now so I'm hoping it'll be up by the time I get home... Annoying but not like the month or so last year

Signed in this morning but I haven't been able to sign in since noon. I still can't sign or play any games online as of 1:00AM EST. But what bothers me is that they don't say what the point of these maintenance periods are for. Are they checking there security or adding security. Or are they working on features for PSNs future.

American idol? Really? Ill keep watching persona 4 on my vita until this passes... I'm about to jump on my scooter and head to the beach with 3 chicks and some of my homies, one of my homies is on a bike, the other is on some roller blades....strange tho... They beat me there...even stranger.....one of the homies has a black thong on... What will happen next? See that .... That's more entertaining than American idol.

Sucks, still down here in Cali as well. I was pretty busy this afternoon anyways and got home to watch the Lakers Game hoping it would be back up by then. My Fortune I guess that I recently bought Assassin's Creed 2 with Plus so that should keep me busy. Then on to Assassin's Creed 3 Right After!

Lol You ps3 fans talk like psn is on par with xbox live. I play both systems and only a diehard ps3 fan that have fully experienced xbox live would believe that. You are right we do pay an average of 5 dollars a month but like I always said you get what you pay for

Can sign on to PSN all okay, but when I come to play games I can't. Medal of Honor Warfighter gets stuck at the "Logging into Origin" screen, and Assassin's Creed 3 Liberation says the Ubisoft servers are unavailable at this time.

when xbox was down for like 20 minutes like a month ago for the first time in 5 years, sony fanboys were all like, hahaha you xbox fanboys haahah," and whenever sonys system goes down, everyones like, its ok, i can do this, its probably important, let sony do what they need to, i prefer single player its ok.....

Come on PSN, me and my boys wanna play some Uncharted 3 co-op. It's kinda funny my brother bought Uncharted 3 last night(I know he's late to the party)but he couldn't play it online so he was forced to talk on the phone while the rest of us enjoyed the game. Funnier still, is the fact that I was playing online all night and he couldn't and he's my next door neighbor. You'd think his connection would be the same as mine.

This is actually quite annoying if they are going to do Server maintenance they need to start doing them late at nights like between 2am to 7am in the morning, the Fact almost 24 hours after they started they still can't get the servers back up shows how unorganized & unprofessional Sony's technical department is.

My PS3 is now useless the one day I'm free to just kick back & play some games & watch Hulu.

@Danja,
This is what I'm talking about. My kids are off from school today, if Live were down; they'd be PISSED! Same for their classmates & teammates that were looking forward to this day off from school. They're ready to play. I even took the day off to play some co-op with my kids.

You get what you pay for!
M$ worked on LIVE 3 years before the regular XBOX was released. That's some serious R&D dollars, people need to be compensated for a job well done.

Don't act as tho live doesn't go down sometimes tho. It been down before. But still this is annoying its been almost 24hrs. Today I'm off so I hope it comes back on.... I can't complain too loudly tho... I mean it is free.